MetzMash

Enterprise Widgets: What Does Your Brand Need To Know?

The one thing that I know about widgets is that many of them depend on consumer adoption to succeed. We're not talking about those kinds of widgets today. We're talking about enterprise widgets, and ad networks and analytics brands have been using them for a few years now. The question that you have to address for your company this: "What's the role of enterprise widgets for our brand?"

But you might not have a really solid idea of what an enterprise widget is.

What defines a widget?

• It's something that occupies a small area on a web page or blog - usually smaller than your hand.
• It's made up of a portable chunk of code that can be installed or cut-and-pasted within an existing HTML page.
• It executes on information that usually comes from outside of the page that it's hosted on, but can also leverage on-page information (think Gmail or Yahoo Mail ads)

Sometimes widgets are known by other names: gadget, badge, or module. I know of three companies that allow you to make entire web pages out of widgets: Pageflakes, Netvibes and yourMinis.

Let's start with one you may know of: Google's Adsense product.

It's a widget, and one that tries to be contextually relevant by showing you ads based on what you've written in an email or the particular web page that you happen to be on.

Let's dive a little deeper look at a few of the ways that enterprise brands have tried engaging in social media by using widgets. This first example is pictured above. The Discovery Channel (Discovery Communications) partnered with LaunchSquad client Newsgator last June to make a widget to promote the 20th anniversary of their Shark Week show. (By the way, I'm not linking to this because it's a LaunchSquad client - I'm linking to this because it's high-quality social media). The widget was really only a part of a multi-pronged social media initiative including blogs, games, quizzes, virtual dives and other really engaging content. If you spend a little time on this site, I don't think you'll feel like eating shark any time soon. It's pretty cool stuff, and fun.

There are a few reasons the Shark Week widget rocked so hard:

• It allowed end-users to share their interest in shark content
• It looked cool and was lightly branded to match the rest of the Shark Week content
• It was viral in nature due to the GET THIS WIDGET link on the bottom of the widget
• It addressed the spectrum of engagement - non-bloggers (99% of the population) could pop in their iGoogle page or on their Facebook profiles while bloggers who actually could cut and paste code could take it right from the widget itself and be creative with it

Let's look at a less flashy, but more widely distributed widget approach. SAP has been experimenting with this stuff for over a year, and now have a very active widget forum. It's a virtual clearinghouse for SAP widgets and plenty of others (Mac OS X, Windows Vista). From what I can tell, it's a very polite and helpful place, and very business-focused.

SAP's view on widgets is that they're "helper applications" that ideally monitor a larger application without the user having to actually launch the whole darn thing. But if you think about it, that's exactly what the Shark Week widget is doing. If a given Shark Week viewer is going to visit their Facebook profile daily, but only going to check out the Shark Week website, say, once a month, they are using the Shark Week widget as a helper application and a substitute for the Shark Week site. The application's goals are pretty simple:

• Show people that I like sharks
• Tell me what time the shark show is on and if I've seen that episode yet
• Put cool pictures of sharks on my web page or blog

Sure, this is a far cry from a CRM widget that would tell you how many crates of baby food shipped out yesterday, but you get the picture of the functions that an enterprise widget fulfills - it displays engaging or necessary information to your stakeholders. 

Here are reasons that widgets should be a part of your social media strategy toolset:

1. Your brand might have stakeholders who work at so fast of a pace that they may not have time for long engagements with big applications. That includes even visiting your web page.
2. Widgets boil down complicated messes of information down into simpler, bite-size chunks. When you say, "Give me the ten-second version," what you really mean is "Give me the widget."
3. Widgets allow your users to choose where they want to see your brand and gives them the choice to opt-in. Giving them control ultimately leads to more trust in your brand.
4. If designed correctly, pass-along can be done easily.

If you care to read the history lesson on widgets, click on the SAP blog posting listed above. My job is to help you figure out how much of this matters now, and how much time and money you should spending on it.

Beware of Get Friday!

It takes a lot for me to put up a cranky post, but this company crossed the line. After reading about them in Tim Ferriss' book "The 4-Hour Work Week," I attempted to trim my workload by engaging Get Friday (no link love here) to do 10 hours per month of research for me.

I emailed them in early August, after signing up by credit card, to let them know that I was putting the deal on ice for a month. They then proceeded to bill me without me having used the service in late September. 40 days and 5 emails later, I still lack a refund. I'll keep my readers updated, but these emails that I'm sending to their customer service are getting returned, but no refund is appearing, although this company did no work for me. And they want me to pay about $130 for nothing. Shady.

Update (11/3): After about 51 days of email wrangling, they refunded my money. Thanks, J. Rozario.

R.I.P. Lance Hahn

[I know that this is a social media blog, by definition, but I think that good social media is all about passion. And when someone who's a major inspiration to me passes away, it's worth writing about.]

I made a phone call to my two old bandmates from Bicycle Rider today, and what a bummer it was. While reading Pitchfork this morning, I found out that Lance Hahn, guitarist/singer of J Church (and Cringer) had died in Austin this past Sunday after falling into a coma during a kidney dialysis session about a week ago. I knew he'd been ill and

I'd only spent five days of my life with the guy, but, man, what memorable ones they were. The first time I ever saw him was at a punk show at the Nottingham Coop in Madison back in '95 - that was my first real Madison punk show. It was a life-changing experience, because it showed me that I could do everything I tried to do, musically, in high school back in California, out there, in Wisconsin.

His band, J Church, played with Ezra Pound (who sorta morphed into Madison emo band Rainer Maria, one of my favorites). That show was what really inspired me to start a band in Madison. Although it took about two more years to get my band, Bicycle Rider, off the ground.

In the winter of '96 I was privileged to hit the road with J-Church, A Minor Forest and P.E.E. I got to travel with them to shows in Green Bay, Milwaukee and Chicago. In that van, somewhere around Sheyboygan, Lance turned me on to E.L.O. - that weekend, I must say, affected my songwriting forever. His friend Kim (maybe his girlfriend?) also tentatively offered to sign Bicycle Rider to his label, but it never worked out.

I think, by way of Lance's influence, I also got turned on to Nick Lowe, and probably a host of other songwriters. I think Bicycle Rider probably played two or three gigs with J-Church over the years, and the dates that we played with them and The Strike were among the most wonderful shows I've ever played. Being surrounded by people that inspired me, playing in cool punk clubs - a 20-year-old guy can't do anything more awesome than that. That's why I love the above photo of Lance - he looks stocky and strong and happy, just like I remember him.

You know, until today, I hadn't read over Lance's lyrics in a while. But man, over the course of those 200-300 songs, he wrote some great, beautiful stuff. And it was probably no picnic being one of the only Asian-American guys in the punk scene in the '80s, '90s and '00s, where latent racism was a lot more prevalent than what you'd expect from a bunch of "cool people" who were supposed to be abandoning the worst of society's ills to unite around music.

Little details jump out at you in the wake of somebody's passing. It's really funny - until today, I didn't even know that Lance played guitar for Beck for a short time. It goes to show you that there are sides of people that you don't even know, even when you know 20 or 30 of their songs, and have played a bunch of shows with them. Before there were social networks like Facebook and MySpace and before everybody and their mother was on the inter webs, there were guys like Lance Hahn that wrote songs that people put on mix tapes and listened to, alone in their bedrooms, and driving around aimlessly in their parents' cars. And even though everything can be downloaded in 30 seconds these days, I hope there are a helluva lot more great songwriters like Lance. My condolences to his girlfriend, close friends and family.

Microformats: Do You Need To Know This?

I've been reading up on microformats for the last few weeks and spending a bit of time over at Microformats.org. Today, I came across a pretty interesting but very dense book by John Allsopp called Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0. (For your convenience, I've added the title to the Metzmash Canteen). The point of understanding how microformats will play in your future communications and marketing is all about figuring out how your brand is going to answer questions.

How is your toilet company, for example, going to answer a question like, "What is a toilet that will fit into a 38" x 24" x 24" space in our new bathroom, that doesn't use a lot of water and is available in black?"

It would probably take a human searching on the Kohler website and about 15 or 20 minutes to figure that out (have you figured out that I'm in the bathroom remodel market yet?). But there probably is a toilet on that website that meets those exact specifications. That's where microformats could feasibly come in - product pages and PDFs can be enabled for better searchability. That's what John Allsopp's book is all about.

Chapters One and Two are a sturdy preview of what you need to know about microformats, and there's a fairly solid breakdown of publishers who are currently using them (Yahoo, Cork'd, Eventful, Apple, edgeio). The later chapters get into some real heavy stuff that you'll want to look over with the I.T. department, but Parts One, Three and Four look like they're gonna be required reading for marketing and brand managers in the next few months.

The bits and pieces of Alsopp's book that I've investigated are definitely on the geekier side of the marketing spectrum, but if you're looking for a pretty solid download on emerging best practices of the semantic web, this is a helluva place to start.

Weekend Reading For Brand Managers

This week's been a little crazy, so I haven't been posting with regular frequency, but I wanted to give a quick weekend roundup to some excellent social media articles I've come across in the last week:

1. The Facebook Fanboy Panel: 3 Keys To Monetizing Facebook - This is from the excellent Master of 500
Hats blog (Dave McClure), and it's a video panel that feature's TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble (The ScobleShow), Jason Calacanis (Mahalo) , Rodney Rumford and blog author Dave McClure. Wish I could have made that gig! Watch this vid and take notes. It's the cheapest Facebook lesson you'll see this month.

2. 10 Truths of Marketing In A Web 2.0 World - If I had a buck for every time Rohit Bhargava ate a conference box lunch in 2007, I could remodel my freakin' kitchen. This guy is everywhere. This week, he's reporting from eMarketing Summit in Austin. Kudos to Brian Solis @ Futureworks for the tipoff.

3. Radiohead allowing listeners to name their price - Ryan Karpeles over at Living Light Bulbs is quickly becoming one of my favorite bloggers. His views on advertising and marketing are more theoretical and less tactical than, say, Bhargava, who's mentioned above, but, boy, is he simple and to-the-point. Pop him in your RSS feed when you can.

This may only look like a quick 1-2-3, but going through all of this should get you through a couple cups of coffee and a page or two of a notepad. Have a good weekend.

5 Things Your Brand Can Learn From Kiss

I used to think that listening to Kiss was one if my guilty pleasures. I probably own 15 Kiss albums. Then, I found out that my 54-year-old father-in-law was also a fan, so I guess there's some kind of cross-generational appeal.

So, these four dudes ran the most colossal marketing/rock'n'roll juggernauts of the last 50 years - there's no doubt in my mind that when Alie and I are sitting on the sunporch of the Oakland Senior Center in 2050 that some anthropologist is going to rip open a 1976 time capsule and pull out a copy of Kiss Alive! (It's also a safe bet that Alie will still think they suck in 2050, but I digress...)

Since most of this blog's readers are striving, if not to make their brands Kiss-cool, at least, to make them Kiss-popular. And just because your brand has a business face on it (SuccessFactors, Hertz, etc.) doesn't mean it can't have raving fans. So, without further ado, here's what I learned from Kiss.

1. Learn when to take off the makeup. In 1983, ten years into their career, Kiss knew when their fans had outgrown the  greasepaint schtick. If your brand can't break out of the mold and talk in a two-way conversation with passion, then, don't engage. It's not like you've got to be 100% transparent about your company's every next move; you've just got to contribute to the conversation. When Kiss took off their makeup, they were doing so because they thought it made them relevant as a rock/metal band, in the context of the marketplace at the time. And it did.
   
2. A brand is a brand, not a person. Don't talk like one. When Kiss tried to issue four simultaneous solo albums in 1978, it was the biggest flop of their careers, to that point. The fans recognized them as a group entity, not as a collection of individuals, in terms of their music. So, while it may work to blog as individuals in a multi-voiced blog, and to have multiple voices in the conversation all coming from your brand, blogging does not make your brand a person. 
3. Inspire the fantasy. There's a reason that musicians as diverse as Kurt Cobain and Garth Brooks were inspired by Kiss: that band put the fantasy of stardom within their reach (and they weren't the greatest musicians either). These guys were so freakin' passionate about what they did, and it showed. I think the two most influential groups of the 1970s were Kiss and the Velvet Underground - because they inspired so many thousands of other bands, not because they were the best. If your social media work doesn't inspire at least your current customers (let alone your prospective customers), then it's not working.
4. You don't have to give away the secret sauce, you just gotta show up for the conversation. One of the best moments of Kiss video is a very early Gene Simmons 1974 appearance on the Mike Douglas show, where aging comic Totie Fields called Simmons "a nice Jewish boy," stating that, "you can't hide the hook." Simmons coolly replied, "Wouldn't you like to know....," licking his lips. As long as you're taking part in the conversation (with other entities, and not just on your own blog), you're doing your part. But beware, there are going to be Totie Fieldses all over the place, saying whatever it is that they're gonna say. She ended up doing over a hundred appearances on the show before her untimely death in the late '70s.
5. Sometimes, what the fans like best is the roughest, most unpolished stuff. The most popular Kiss album of all time, in terms of individual sales: Kiss Alive! This is Kiss at their messiest, wildest and most unpolished. The initiatives that have been key in bringing customer engagement back to General Motors and customer service as a paragon of Dell's recent initiatives have revolved around blogging and two-way conversation. Granted, Dell's initiative started because Jeff Jarvis "caught them on a bad night," but that  was all it took to inject them into the conversation. And that was all it took for Kiss, too.

Coming next week: social media, as taught by Ted Nugent.

Yes, I Joined A Gym

What Happened To The CD Stores of Palo Alto?

I grew up in Palo Alto - I moved there when I was 10, and stayed until two days after I graduated high school.  I come back once in a while, to have dinner with my parents, and this morning, I had to come down to do a meeting at Mozes. As I was driving down Lytton Street, I tho ught back to all of the CD stores that my friends and I used to hang out at, back in the late '80s and early '90s. They're all gone; I'm unsure if there's anything that even resembles a music store in or near Palo Alto anymore. (It looks like there's a Hear Music at Stanford Shopping Center, but at $17/CD, I don't think I'd have any reason to go there).

When I was 12, I worked at a tiny store adjacent from where the Apple store is now, called Rainbow Records. My friend Erik Bielefeldt and I probably spent all of our eighth-grade spring break alphabetizing cassettes in exchange for Lemonheads and Little Caesar promo tapes. To paraphrase the VU, "Hey, those were different times." I think Rainbow went under around 1990, and besides, they never really caught the CD train. We also spent a good bit of time that year running errands for a really large dude named Rob, a 250+ lb. diabetic chap who ran the Record Heaven on El Camino, a smelly but well-stocked store that was sadly later overrun by Mr. Chau's, who occupies the space to this day. Compact Disc Land, for a time, was the only CD store on the University Ave. strip (1990-2002), but they folded right before I moved back to town.

It's funny - my return to Palo Alto coincided with the widespread use of iTunes as the de facto music browser. I came back to town in late 2003, to take a teaching internship at my old high school, Palo Alto High. It was around this time that I began to notice the iPod as the ubiquitous portable music device, as most of my students at the time carried one. It's revisionist shorthand to say that the iPod killed all of the record stores in town, but it should be seen as no small coincidence either. As I walked down University Avenue this morning, listening to New Order on my iPhone, I was unsure which way I would rather have had it. While I missed being able to go to a store and flip through the stacks of shiny plastic CDs, there was something really satisfying about purchasing my former bandmate Luke Paquin's new album, Happiness, Ltd. on my computer at work, without having to get up and go anywhere.

If you're wondering what this (first) post has to do with social media, it's a muddled attempt, for me, to be constantly asking myself how close I am to my roots, and how those roots made me the person I am today. And if social media's not about being real, then I don't know what the fuck it is.